Because of interference, congestion and signal issues, users of wireless networks often experience degradation of services over the wireless network in which data is transmitted. Currently employed wireless network installation and validation methods may be inadequate to identify common sources of wireless network degradation. The inability to identify and correct network degradation negatively may affect the customer's quality of experience, resulting in excess service and repair visits, customer dissatisfaction, and customer turn over.
Placement of a Wi-Fi enabled gateway is an important consideration for improving Wi-Fi network quality of service. Unfortunately the current method for placing a Wi-Fi enabled gateway is random from a quality of service point of view and is driven by the technician selecting the most convenient location for the Wi-Fi enabled gateway or the customer dictating the location. This method of locating a Wi-Fi enabled gateway does not take into account interference or attenuation and therefore often results in poor quality of service. Using an existing solution such as a current tester device may present an improvement over the current random method for locating the Wi-Fi enabled gateway; however, the use of the current tester device may require a technician to walk to each location within the premise served by the Wi-Fi network and validate the Wi-Fi quality of service. If the quality of service is unacceptable at any location in the premise the technician would need to move the Wi-Fi enabled gateway to a new position which is assumed to be better and repeat the entire quality of service validation.
Current tester devices also fall short in that they take a “one time snapshot” of the radio disturbers and network performance. During this analysis, interfering devices may not be operating, which may result in a poor location placement of the gateway and inconsistent wireless network performance. Therefore a single testing device that takes a “one time snapshot” of the network are not practical for validating the quality of services delivered by a Wi-Fi network.